Who better to consult on Ed Wood's birthday than Bob Blackburn?
October is Ed Wood's birth month. The director/writer/star of Glen or Glenda (1953) would have turned 101 years old on October 10, 2025. I couldn't just let this milestone pass without adequate fanfare. And so, I bring you the following conversation with the illustrious Bob Blackburn, one of two heirs to the estate of the late Kathy Wood. (That makes him the de facto spokesman for the Ed Wood estate as well.) A second-generation radio industry professional, Bob is also a musician and author. In addition to his 2024 memoir, Kathy Wood & I, he has compiled three indispensable volumes of Ed Wood's magazine work from the 1960s and '70s: Blood Splatters Quickly (2014), Angora Fever (2019), and When the Topic is Sex (2021).
Despite all this, Bob was never a guest on The Ed Wood Summit Podcast during its original run (2021-2023) when it was hosted by the late, much-missed Greg Javer. Bob has certainly given plenty of interviews about Ed Wood over the years, but he somehow never wound up on this particular show. Well, today, we change all that. On this episode, Bob shares some rare items from his collection of Ed Wood memorabilia and answers some general questions about Ed and Kathy. I think it's a fun and informative chat. Enjoy.
August 2001. It must have happened. There must have been one. The month before everything changed. America's Last Days of Pompeii.
Thinking back, that was a very busy month for me. That was when I quit my customer service job in Flint and moved to Joliet, Illinois to become a middle school Spanish teacher. It was also the first time in my life I ever had my own apartment and lived totally on my own. (I don't count living in the dorms.)
Yeah, August 2001 was a pivotal time in my life. And yet, for obvious reasons, I barely remember it. Because of... well, you know.
This week on These Days Are Ours, we review a movie from August 2001: Garry Marshall's The Princess Diariesstarring Anne Hathaway and Julie Andrews. The lightest of light entertainment. Just the thing for a late summer movie. I hope America enjoyed the holy hell out of it.
But how does it hold up in October 2025? Push play on the podcast below and find out.
In case you don't follow me on any of my social media accounts, I have some exciting news about the Happy Days documentary that includes an interview with me. The show will air on the CW on Monday, November 10, 2025 at 8:00 EST and 7:00 CST! The title of the series has changed from TV That Changed the World to TV We Love, and it has switched networks from CBS to the CW. That's showbiz, I guess. I'm just happy that it's finally going to air, and I hope you will watch it.
In the meantime, TV We Love will air every Monday night on the CW for the next eight weeks. The show premiered tonight with a look at I Love Lucy. Future episodes will cover Dynasty, Cheers, The Love Boat, The Brady Bunch, and more.
Director Steve Apostolof poses with actress Rene Bond, who starred in several of his movies.
It's taken me a while, I realize, but it's finally time to wrap up my look at the 1999 Something Weird compilation tape, The Erotic World of A.C. Stephen, gifted to me by reader Brendon Sibley. What can I say? There was just too much material in The Erotic World to cover in a single article. Or two articles. I spent five years working on a book about Stephen C. Apostolof, and there were things on this tape even I hadn't seen in my research.
Steve Apostolof looks over a script, probably an erotic one.
So where were we?
Two weeks ago, I started discussing Something Weird Video's The Erotic World of A.C. Stephen (1999), a compilation of clips from the films of softcore director and frequent Ed Wood collaborator Stephen C. Apostolof (1928-2005). Reader Brendon Sibley sent me a copy of this rare tape, and I was happily making my way through its contents. When we left off, I was talking about Bachelor's Dream (1967), a very obscure short film that began life as some black-and-white test footage that was shot for Orgy of the Dead (1965).
But that was just the opening act! The Erotic World has so much more to offer. After Bachelor's Dream ends, we see some trailers for Steve's non-Ed Wood films: Office Love-In (1968), Motel Confidential (1969), Suburbia Confidential (1966), and College Girls (1968). These were nudity-filled, black-and-white exploitation flicks from Steve's "confidential" phase, when he was busy exposing the seamy side of average, everyday American life. Several of these films feature Steve's most-frequent leading man, Harvey Shain (aka Forman Shane), and his most-frequent leading lady, Marsha Jordan.
Director Garry Marshall had the biggest hit of his life with the romantic comedy Pretty Woman (1990), but he didn't spend the next few years trying to copy it. His follow-up film, Frankie and Johnny (1992), was an adaptation of a Terrence McNally play, and he only slightly watered it down and gussied it up for Hollywood. It did acceptably. But then came what I think of as Garry's Trilogy of Terror: three back-to-back critical and box office disasters that should have had him seriously rethinking his career. Ignored by audiences and reviled by the press, Exit to Eden (1994), Dear God (1996), and The Other Sister (1999) were all major miscalculations on Garry's part.
Did Garry Marshall start to have self-doubts? Maybe, because he then reteamed with Pretty Woman stars Julia Roberts and Richard Gere for Runaway Bride, a romantic comedy expressly designed to remind people of the previous film. The script had been bouncing around Hollywood for years, with various stars attached to it. But the version that got made was the movie we're reviewing this week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast. To hear what we thought of it, go ahead and push the play button on the podcast below.
The many haircuts of David Robert Jones (1947-2016).
In September 2025, I decided to write a series of articles about British rock legend David Bowie. Why? Well, I figured I'd been ignoring his music for too long, and it was high time I changed that. But I couldn't possibly listen to everything he ever recorded. So I decided to make a speed-run through just his official studio albums, reviewing one a day for the entire month. Below, you'll find a list of the articles I wrote during that time.
Being dead didn't stop David Bowie from releasing one more studio album.
The album: Toy (ISO, 2021)
The baby who sold the world.
My thoughts: Until now, I have stubbornly resisted talking about Toy, an album David Bowie recorded in 2000 that was shelved by his label and remained unreleased until 2021, five years after the singer's death. For one thing, a posthumously-released LP seems to fall into the dreaded "apocrypha and miscellanea" category that I pledged to avoid at the beginning of the month. (Not part of the canon? Not interested.) Secondly, I knew that Toy mostly consisted of remakes of songs David Bowie had originally written in the 1960s. Unless we're talking about last night's pizza, leftovers aren't usually too appetizing to me.
But I changed my mind for a couple of reasons. First, when I wrote my defense of Bowie's under-loved Pin Ups (1973) album, I said that people should forget it was a collection of covers and just try to experience it as a half-hour of great rock music. So for me to dismiss Toy, which is Bowie covering himself, would be hypocritical. Second, and even more important, I listened to the first few tracks on Toy and enjoyed them enough to want to keep listening to the LP. So I guess we're doing this.
Most of these tracks are from early singles recorded before David's 1967 debut LP, which means that they're entirely unfamiliar to me. Or new, you might say. (Remember that NBC slogan from the '90s? "If you haven't seen it, it's new to you." Hard to argue with that.) Honestly, based on its sound and knowing nothing of its origin, I would have thought Toy to be just another early 2000s Bowie album. Even though it was produced by Mark Plati, who worked with David on Earthling (1997), it takes a lot from the Tony Visconti playbook. This is a very sonically-satisfying, richly-produced album that shows off Bowie's voice to best advantage.
I think it's significant that, when he was in his 50s, David Bowie revisited the songs he wrote when he was a much younger man—a mere lad, really. It's like finding a journal you kept when you were a kid and thinking, "Was that really me? Did I ever really think that way?" Bowie (in great voice, incidentally) brings some gravitas to these tunes that they might have lacked when they were sung by a teenager. Take the song "Baby Loves That Way" as an example. Being in a toxic relationship when you're 18 is very different from being in one when you're 54. And then there's "London Boys," which sounds like the older Bowie is gently lecturing his younger self about the follies of trying to be cool to impress your peers.
If there's a standout track on Toy for me, it's "You've Got a Habit of Leaving," originally a single Bowie released in 1965 when he was still Davy Jones. It's another toxic relationship song, so I'm guessing Bowie's personal life was already complicated in the '60s. To me, the remake could have been a hit in 2021 with its stark refrain: "Sometimes I cry/Sometimes I'm so sad." I was so taken with the Toy track that I listened to the original from '65 and found a charming but disposable Merseybeat bop. Maybe the reason why Bowie dug these songs up in 2000 is that he felt he could do them justice the second time around. He'd sure spent a lot more time in recording studios by then.
And that, I suppose, brings us to the end of My Month of Bowie. Thirty days hath September. But I don't think this is the end of my David Bowie journey by any means. What I wanted out of this project was a basic roadmap of David's career. And I got that. But I got more. A lot more. Who knows? Maybe some additional Bowie content will make its way onto this blog. God knows, there's plenty more to cover. I think I've reviewed about 5% of the man's total discography. So much territory to explore. Let's reconvene in September 2026.
P.S. Before I go, I want to share this clip of David Bowie on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. He performs "Life on Mars?" and "Ashes to Ashes." Isn't this neat? Thank you, algorithm, for bringing this to me.
